London, August 16

The talk is public. It is hosted by the Global Warming Policy Foundation. I’m going to be talking about events over the past year, but will mostly be talking about the increased emphasis by the climate “community” on Climate Extremes, paying particular attention to the IPCC Special Report on Extremes (SREX) published in March, which was the basis of WG2 Co-Chair Christopher Field’s recent testimony to Congress.

These leads into tornados, hurricanes, floods, wildfires, heat waves and droughts, the latter two very topical from this year’s very hot North American summer. (Climate, of course, is not about the weather, except when it’s about the weather.)

66 Comments

The shifted distribution meme looks like a “just so” story, and the entire topic seems to be rooted in post hoc fallacy. How does an engineer perform an objective risk assessment of a topic in which both severity and likelihood cannot be bounded in any meaningful way?

Climate is always about weather, since without weather there would be no climate. Some of us would argue that if you don’t understand weather, you can’t understand climate. This applies to adherents on both sides of the CAGW fence. Extremes can be of either climate or weather; it’s a simple matter of aggregating or averaging – or not!

“Climate, of course, is not about the weather, except when it’s about the weather”
But it is precisely when the CAGW climato community moves to the field of weather that their whole concept is falling apart so neatly…

The focus on extremes is such a clever ploy for alarmists. Most people have an even more distorted perception of extreme events than they do of the average. It is easy to get people excited that something is extreme, from the frequency of shark attacks to a particularly hot summer. The understanding of frequencies and extreme event likelihoods is very poor, and many scientists seem innumerate in this area. In the SREX report they set out to find extremes and failed (except for some trivial things). How ironic.

When the thermometers aren’t helping them, they have to pint at something else. But I’m fairly certain that the rash of these kinds of ruses is to keep the so-called “liberals” on the plantation, not to convince any one new.

The “failure to communicate” narrative seems dead, though. It political-ese ycall it the “blame the listener strategy.” To wit, “I’m sorry you misunderstood me,” or , “I should have told my story better.”

Talking about extremes, last winter in the North East part of the US we had a winter that I think it averaged about 5F above normal. Not much snow at all. The over riding impact was massively reduced heating bills, less snow to move, less accidents, and less loss in snow days at home.

In some respects this year is a proxy for the terrible future alarmists forecast. I never hear any alarmists willing to discuss the positive effects of a warmer climate. So discussion of weather extremes and climate is so often a discussion of just the negative impacts. To ordinary people like me (a non-scientist) I read and here about all these terrible things, as I’m holding my utility bill.

The imbalance in what they talk about is what has those pushing alarmist solutions not getting through to people like me.

I notice this comment on accessing Carlton House during the Olympics fandango that lasts well beyond the end of the games themselves.

Welcome

Welcome to the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining, the global network for professionals in the materials cycle.
Access to 1 Carlton House Terrace
Please note that in the lead up to and during the Olympics (18 June to the end of September) there is no access to Carlton House Terrace from the Mall side. Visitors should approach from Pall Mall making use of Piccadilly Circus, Charing Cross or Green Park underground stations. From Trafalgar Square, pedestrian access via Duke of York steps is still open.

Steve
Just remember you are giving this talk in London. Mention the very hot and dry summer and you are bound to get a laugh – we’ve been moderately cold and record-breakingly wet since April (wettest April and June on official records, with May and July both being about twice as wet as ‘normal’).

Steve’s talk was brilliant. No other word for it. If it was David Henderson’s choice to ask him to speak on extreme events it paid off in showing just how broad Steve’s knowledge is by now and how objective and fair his judgment. The room was packed. Josh’s cartoons on the Climate Olympics were to great effect and mirth at the beginning. And I got to meet Spence_UK (younger than I thought) and Andrew Orlowski at the end, both a real thrill. Had to rush off, then realised I had to post this. The AGW-caused extreme event story publicly believed by many of the general public is just incredibly weak. May write up my reflections in the next couple of days. But thanks GWPF and Steve.

It was a good session, Steve spoke well and clearly and pulled no punches… though in an understated Canadian way. His presenttation deserves a wider audience and was being videoed. so maybe it will be up on the GWPF site sometime. He was particularly critical of the IPCC for allowing itself to have been taken over by activists rather than scientists, and I think that he may have used the phrase ‘dereliction of duty’ at some point.

We all adjourned to he pub for further conversation and I was very pleased to meet quite a number of fellow bloggers. In particular Richard Betts from the Met Office, Andrew Orlowski from The Register and Prof. Jonathan Jones and his wife. Good company all of them.

I left at 6:15 and it looked like the discussion would go on for several hours yet.

Just one critical point. The session was not improved by persistent and unsolved problems with the audio gear….giving near constant feedback. Sadly this lent an amateur, unprofessional air to the proceedings. It really is unforgivable that a prestigious event in a very prestigious address in the heart of the West End of London could not find somebody to fix it in 2 hours. It would not at all have impressed a ‘neutral’. Not Steve’s fault but a poor show.

This morning I thought I wasn’t going to make it – I’m part of a team delivering an engineering mathematical model due to be frozen prior to formal testing and I had a mountain of paperwork to get through today in prep for that event. I was informed at 1.30pm that the freeze was going to be delayed – I didn’t need telling twice! I went straight to the station, managed to miss the train by two minutes, but finally arrived about 20 minutes into the talk.

It was great to finally meet Steve, as well as many commenters that I’ve read over the years – just off the top of my head, Richard Drake, Jonathan Jones and his wife; Josh, Richard Betts, katabasis, Piers Corbyn, plus journalists Christopher Booker and Andrew Orlowski. Plus a fair few lurkers who turned up (I’ll not list names as they may like their anonymity!) I know I missed quite a few people who were in the audience but didn’t get a chance to speak to.

The talk was enjoyable and interesting, I liked the corn productivity plot too; it really does highlight how powerful adaptation can be over mitigation.

“I take a fairly nuanced view. I’ve been a severe critic of the IPCC: they’re letting society down, and have an obligation to do much better reports than they do. Their failure to do so is an abnegation of their duty.” His view, he said, was tempered by a view of risk based on his business experience. “You’d be negligent not to take the IPCC as the basis of policy, even if you thought the quality of the work required tremendous improvement. I hope people do a better job.”

From the report in the Register, it sounds like it was a very carefully framed presentation. I regret I wasn’t able to hear it myself: especially the q & a.

Mr. McIntyre, this is very OT but, I believe, will be of interest to you. Two academics from universities in the American corn-belt region used spurious correlation in an attempt to prove that increased use of ethanol as a fuel resulted in a $0,60 to $0.80 reduction in gasoline prices in the U.S. Two economists from U.C. Berkeley and MIT used the corn-belt methodology to “prove” that increased use of ethanol in fuel reduced the U.S. unemployment rate by 50%.

MarkB, this, too, is off topic but I seriously doubt that a new blog is needed to bring this to the attention of CA followers who are not regular visitors of Bishop Hill or WUWT.

As a long-time reader of CA, I am well aware that Mr. McIntyre does not believe in “tooting his own horn.” That said, Paul Matthews has nominated Mr. McIntyre for the John Maddox Prize for standing up for science. Details on the Maddox Prize may be found at:

All the weather conditions being blamed on global warming can be explained by the earth’s 23.4 degrees tilt on its axis. Because of the sun’s and the moon’s gravitational pulls on the earth, this tilt is not stable and fluctuates between aproximately 22 degrees to 24.5 degrees, in 41,000 year Milankovitch cycles, creating our seasons and other climate/weather phenomena including monsoon rains and tornadoes. As earth’s current axial tilt phase decreases, we are going to encounter another ice age in about 15,000 years time regardless of how much CO2 is in the atmosphere.

This is basic planetary science, so I cannot understand how climate scientists can continue to bang on the bogus AGW drum and blame CO2 for bad weather/climate catastrophy. When we look at the earth’s historical temperature record, it has been much warmer many times in the past so AGW theory cannot be correct.

Climate scientists would make more valuable contributions to society by studying how the earth’s orbit and tilt create everything from the jet stream to thermal columns to clouds, rather than continue their misguided demonizing of CO2. By better understanding these natural processes, we could possibly one day create technology sufficient to accurately predict the onset of climate/weather changes.

I agree that we need to look after our planet and cut down on pollution, but it boggles the mind how scientists can blame CO2 for AGW and believe that a tax on CO2 will do anything to change earth’s cyclical climate.

Thanks to Steve for coming over to make the talk. I enjoyed meeting several of you there and getting to bounce my thoughts off a few of you (katabasis, Spence_UK). I rarely get a chance to talk about climate issues so it was a chance for me to talk to folks that know volumes more than I. Great time and thanks.

Leading climate blogger Steve McIntyre says policy makers are failing to prepare the public for climate change and have become obsessed with “petty acts of virtuous behaviour” instead. . . .
“If you’re a policy maker, you have to take as a base case that India and China are going to increase carbon dioxide emissions, and one of the IPCC base cases of CO2 emissions is going to come to pass.” . . .
Asked by climate scientist Richard Betts of the Met Office, an IPCC author, if he saw more hope for the UN panel, McIntyre replied: “Much of the report was drivel, probably most of it. The fact there are a few sensible observations aren’t enough to repay the effort.” . . .
Poor preparedness can turn bad weather into a disaster, and he cited the Thai floods as an example. . . .
“Even in [the North Indian Ocean] there’s a dramatic difference between [storm] casualties in Myanmar and equally poor Bangladesh – which had taken reasonably inexpensive measures to protect itself,” . . .
In business he’d seen “tiger teams” produce good results. A tiger team is a roaming or ad hoc group of technical experts sent in to analyse or fix a problem. Why couldn’t we get a tiger team do an “engineering-grade” independent analysis of a selected climate model? It should be possible for around $20m, which in the larger context is money well spent.

It would be an appropriate outcome if this visit to London was linked to the granting of Civil Honours. Leaving aside the topic of this particular science and the incomplete understanding of its status, but considering its importance, one would be a curmudgeon to deny the quality of the science and mathematics that Steve McIntyre had added to the global debate.

Today I’m pondering the attention given by the MSM to Julian Assange. Here is a skeptic and denier who attacks the established thinking, but is given wide spread attention. He even goes to Ecuador and speaks to no one in particular off a balcony, and he is bestowed the front page of the New York Times.

But I’m not seeing that Steve McIntyre, Alan Watts or Bishop Hill are managing to get any real attention from the MSM, even though you are clearly labeled by some others as skeptics and deniers and are seen by some as inimical to mainstream thought, at least in Climate Science.

Steve,have you, Alan Watts or Bishop Hill considered defecting to Ecuador?:) The Galapagos would be nice, and you could check the effect of rising sea level on its denizens. For a Canadian, perhaps January would be convenient:)

As reported by Andrew Orlowski (The Register) and commented on over at Judith Curry’s, one of the take-home-messages from Steve’s talk was that after he demolished the credibility of the IPCC, Steve is quoted as saying:

“Until it mends its ways, policy makers are stuck with it,”
and
“You’d be negligent not to take the IPCC as the basis of policy, even if you thought the quality of the work required tremendous improvement.”

Will there be a follow up post from our host, elucidating this further?

There’s nothing new here. Steve as always held the position that if you’re a policy-maker you have to rely on the generally accepted “experts.” I disagree, and I expect most of the regulars here do too. However, I will say that if you’re going to reject commonly accepted positions, you need to know how to judge the quality of arguments. Not necessarily the data behind a given position, but the logic and methods used. This means knowledge of philosophy of science in the case of climate science. When there have been threads here or at WUWT or on other skeptic sites, it’s almost always the case that people looked at the attitudes and methods of supposed “experts” and recognized that they were promulgating junk science. I suspect many policy makers are quite capable of making such evaluations, but many of them don’t for political reasons.

Imagine you are a passenger on an airplane and the head of operations hands the pilot a new flight manual, saying – “Although we know the engineers were mucking around when they prepared this manual, until something better comes along, you are stuck with it. Furthermore you will be negligent if you do not use this manual to fly the plane.”

I accept the “shifting of the mean” argument. That is, for each extreme temperature event, the event will be on average about 1C warmer. I have no problem with that.

Hansen also argued that the probability distribution was also changing with respect to the mean. I don’t think he’s made his case. To make his case he would have detrended the anomalies and plotted the standard deviation for moving periods of a particular duration. I’ve done that for USA48 and there is no significant trend for the historical record 1895-2011. If there is a trend, it is toward less variability:

It’s gone very quiet!
– lull before the storm?
– a well earned rest?
– languishing in some god-forsaken airport?
– languishing in the newly built “concentration camps” they were discussing a few years back learning the thoughts of chairman achoo-ey

It took me three days to get back from Erice. I had booked a flight on Aug 25 from Palermo to Rome on a discount airline. When I arrived at the airport (at 5.30 am – a 4 am wakeup in Erice), I learned that the airline (Wind) had gone bankrupt two weeks earlier. I was the only person from the conference who had tried to save the organizers extra money by a cheaper flight. Though there were numerous flights to Rome later in the day, all flights were sold out until September !! There was no internet service at Palermo airport and my phone wasnt working. I went to town (one hour) to get a train. All the trains were booked as were buses. I somewhat frantically rented a car from the airport, foolishly booking it through an aggregator rather than Hertz. I went back to the airport, another hour. I then remembered that there was a ferry from Palermo to Naples. By this time, the information at the airport was open and I booked a ticket on the overnight ferry. There were no sleepers available. I had no problem cancelling with Hertz but had to eat the prepayment at the aggregator.

My wife and I had taken the ferry a few years earlier and there were no chairs. We either had to sit on the floor or, after a while, seized a bar stool and sat on it for hours. I dreaded the overnight ferry. I waited in town for hours until the 9 pm ferry, mostly at a nearby restaurant. By this time my computer was nearly drained as well, but the restaurant let me recharge. A fellow near me went to the ferry ticket office at 4 pm and when he returned said that he got a sleeper. I went over and they didnt have any. Actually it turned out all right. They had overnight lounges that had reclining chairs like airplanes arranged in rows like an airplane. I put on airplane mask and earplugs, took a heavy gravol and slept through the night.

Meanwhile, I wasn’t able to get a plane from Rome to Toronto until Monday afternoon. I had to buy a new ticket.

Being stuck in Rome doesnt sound bad, but I was ready to come home and somewhat in a bad mood. On the other hand, I’ve taken lots of trips in my life and never got burned like this before, so I was fairly phlegmatic about it. I was a lot more tired when I got home.

I think that the tiredness is mostly because I sprained my ankle badly early in the summer and haven’t got proper exercise since then. It also hasn’t healed properly and I’m finally trying to deal with it.

BFJ, you’re not the only person to notice that. Steve did make a post, but he took it down. The same thing has happened in the past. I know of at least one case where he had made a post, but he pulled it down and re-published it with a very different tone. At the time, my assumption was he wrote a post while upset, but he regretted the tone and decided to rewrite it. It may be that the same is happening here.

On the other hand, it may just be that he decided he didn’t want a discussion of the topic on his blog at all, and he won’t publish a replacement post. There’s nothing wrong with that decision, but it will obviously create some confusion in people like you.

TL;DR: You’re not hallucinating. He made a post, but he took it down. He may or may not replace it with something else.

Didn’t mean to associate this 20th century “index” study of temp. extremes with millenial “Hockey Stick” reconstructions — only pointing out the possible parallel of shaky methodology to achieve a “Hockey Stick” graph which is pre-ordained.

My mistake. Our host, Steve McIntyre, has an excellent analytical mind, that has greatly benefitted us. That was what the straw man needed in the Wizard of Oz.

It was the lion that needed courage. So did I in 2009 after Climategate emails and documents were released and I watched world leaders and leaders of the scientific community try to justify false temperature data.

The following verses from the Bhagavad Gita gave me courage to engage the tiger whose tail I had been pulling since 1975:

“Having made yourself alike in pain and pleasure, profit and loss, victory and defeat, engage in this great war and you will be freed from sin, Arjuna.”

“But if you do not participate in this battle against evil, you will be violating your dharma and your honor, and you will incur sin.”Bhagavad Gita 2:34-38

This is highly relevant to the history of Climate Audit and misunderstandings about the status of the hockey stick(s) etc. Lewandowsky and his un-scientific psychology surveys are current hot topics of interest on several blogs including WUWT, Lucia’s, and Bishop Hill. If anyone wonders how Lewandowsky came to concoct surveys and an article in Psychological Science portraying climate “skeptics” as conspiracy theorists about moon landings etc. the “review” which SL wrote of Michael Mann’s book provides some valuable context to SL’s views:

It turns out that Lewandowsky is not merely an obsequious member of the Hockey Team but a believe in Michael Mann as Copernicus, or something approaching that: Mann and his hockeystick “will forever change how humanity views its future.”